The design calls for rendering all amounts with their currency symbol,
but golang.org/x/text’s currency package always render the symbol in
front, which is wrong in Catalan and Spanish, and a lot of other
languages.
Consulting the Internet, the most popular package for that is
accounting[0], which is almost as useless because they confuse locale
with the currency’s country of origin’s “usual locale” (e.g., en-US for
USD), which is also wrong: in Catalan i need to write USD prices as
"1.234,56 $" regardless of what Americans do.
With accounting i have the recourse of initializing the struct that
holds all the “locale” information, which is also wrong because i have
to define the decimal and thousands separators, something that depends
only on the locale, next to the currency’s precision, that is
locale-independent. But, since all CLDR data from golang.org/x/text
is inside an internal package, i can not access it and would need to
define all that information myself, which defeats the purpose of using
an external package.
Since for now i only need the format pattern for currency, i just saved
it into the database of available languages, that i do not expect to
grow too much.
[0]: https://github.com/leekchan/accounting
I do not want to use floats in the Go lang application, because it is
not supposed to do anything with these values other than to print and
retrieve them from the user; all computations will be performed by
PostgreSQL in cents.
That means i have to “convert” from the price format that users expect
to see (e.g., 1.234,56) to cents (e.g., 123456) and back when passing
data between Go and PostgreSQL, and that conversion depends on the
currency’s decimal places.
At first i did everything in Go, but saw that i would need to do it in
a loop when retrieving the list of products, and immediately knew it was
a mistake—i needed a PL/pgSQL function for that.
I still need to convert from string to float, however, when printing the
value to the user. Because the string representation is in C, but i
need to format it according to the locale with golang/x/text. That
package has the information of how to correctly format numbers, but it
is in an internal package that i can not use, and numbers.Digit only
accepts numeric types, not a string.
jordi fita mas